Gus,
Our dedicated server business has been picking up wildly over the last few
months. We have a very solid platform now that works well with our supported
OSes (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Fedora, CentOS 3 and 4, RHEL 3 and 4, Debian). The
problem is that it's still based on the 845 chipset. It's time to move to the
newer chipsets. We have been testing different mobos left and right to
find the
one to replace the current $99/mo special that we sell so many of.
The requirements are:
Boots to USB CD/DVD drive (there are still some that don't !)
Micro ATX or Mini ATX (smaller is better)
Can fit 2Gb or RAM or more (4Gb is ideal)
SATA controller for 2 drives
Video built-in
least amount of shared video RAM as possible
100Mbps LAN or GigE built-in
Plays nice with 3Ware RAID cards
It's not crap
It's not perceived to be crap
Needs to work with the stock kernels and driver sets that come with default
installations of OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Debian, RHEL 3 and 4, CentOS 3 and 4.
The reason I concentrated my questions on Mobos is that those are the devices
that are the hardest to get to fit the requirements above. The rest is just
drives and memory, etc. We use Kingston memory. Who has good drives changes
from time to time (or more to the point, some maker at any given time seems to
have a drive that is crap, we roll with the punches on that one).
As far as CPUs goes, the power savings will be appreciated if we goes
with AMDs,
but the perceived value of one or the other, by our customers is more
important. If people leap out of their skins to buy one instead of the other,
then we have to follow that. The truth is that in most cases, the CPUs are
going to sit almost idle, most of the time. Our customers are tech savvy, and
so are the people on this list. What they like, and what you like weigh
heavily
on what we choose to sell as our standard platform for the next
generation. The
last generation has lasted almost 3yrs.
So, your comments and the comments of the others on this list are important to
me. I appreciate your comments.
Thanks,
Mike
Quoting Gus Wirth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
At 13:15 12/21/2005 -0800, Michael J McCafferty wrote:
All,
For as much hardware I buy, one would think me more of a hardware nut. My
excuse is that I decide what I am going to buy, then buy tons of the same
thing, so I don't need to make HW decisions very often. That being the
case, I
would like to ask your opinions of the following hardware brands. The
question
is intentionally vague. I wan't the reputation, the beat on the street, the
impression, etc. The ultiamte use will be for small, entry-level, commodity
servers for light jobs etc. So, any of the below will do the job,
but in this
case it matters what the average geek's impression of the below is.
Motherboards:
ASUS
I have had good luck with these, both in servers and workstations. The
servers had P2B-D dual processor Pentium III slot processors and ran
contiuously for over 7 years without problems until being retired. The
workstations had the P5A-B boards with K6-2/400 processors and worked great.
ASUS has also extended their warranty out to 3 years as compared to one
year for most other brands.
MSI
Don't know personally. They don't seem to have a very good reputation by
various reports.
Intel
These seem to be fairly decent boards but I don't have enough history on
them to say for certain.
Gigabyte
Supermicro
Don't know about these.
<your favorite here>
I would add Tyan here. I have my old Trinity board which has been running
my desktop for about 6 years. It has survived two power supply failures and
innumerable power cycling (I turn my PC off when I'm not using it) without
a hitch. They also have a three year warranty.
CPU's (Do NOT compare P4 to Celeron, or Athlon to Sempron)
I've never seen a CPU failure so I can't really comment here.
All this concentration on boards and CPUs ignores the real troublemakers
which are cooling fans, power supplies and hard drives. I usually have to
replace fans within a year, power supplies after about 2-3 years and hard
drives about 3 years. Some parts seem to last forever, but others even from
the same lot will fail within months.
One of the things to remember in all this is that past performance is no
guarantee of future suitablity. Product lifecycle is typically around 9
months to a year, and even within a single model there are various versions
that change even more frequently. Thus it is very difficult to judge a
current product. Even reputable manufacturers can fall prey to bad
components. Witness the motherboard capacitor problem from a while back
<http://www.badcaps.com>
Gus
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Michael J. McCafferty
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M5 Hosting
858-576-7325 Voice
http://www.m5hosting.com
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